http://www.kommunisterne.dk , mailto:kpid@kommunisterne.dk

International Meeting of Communist and Workers' Parties

New Delhi, November 20-22, 2009

Intervention by Betty Frydensbjerg Carlsson, Communist Party in Denmark

Last year in Brazil we discussed the current situation of the international capitalism. At that time the financial crisis had just started, and we were analyzing what would happen further on. This year we know better what the capitalism and almost all the governments worldwide have done and are doing to survive and overcome this very deep crises of the capitalist system at all..

The signs of the crisis are as always: a heavy growth in unemployment, severe cutbacks in the total production measured by the gross national production and shutdowns of many companies. The real reason for the economic crisis is as usual the ever existing antagonistic contradiction between the capitalists chasing for the maximum profits and the relative decline of the purchasing power of the workers and the overwhelming part of the populations. Therefore the growth of production of the first years of this century has been replaced by a situation, where the markets for the produced goods are declining and the products can not be sold. This cyclical crisis is, as Marx demonstrated many years ago, a situation that emerges regularly for the capitalist system.

But the current crisis is not just another of many economical crisis. There is some very important new characteristics in this crisis.

The first very important characteristic is that the crisis is truly global. Only very few of the countries in the world are not experiencing the crisis.

Another important characteristic is that big capital in order to try to maintain its profit has transferred millions and millions of dollars from the productive sphere to pure speculation in strange financial assets. The money spent on speculation exceeds many times the money spent in real production. In the long run it is, of cause, not possible to build most of a country’s economy on speculation.

What makes this even more serious is how the states and the working class – for the last mentioned not willingly and for many not even known - have been involved in the speculating financial capital. In our country it is rather new that for instance the pension money people are saving through their jobs has been invested in stocks and speculation. And not many people knew that the money we pay in income tax was invested in stocks.

The Nordic model of capitalism was until the middle of the 90’s based on collective rights paid through taxes. Only workers in the public sector saved money through their wages to get a better pension than most, and this money was placed – as the paid tax money- in public companies where the public was in the control, or in bonds.

In this crises municipalities as well as the state and pension companies have lost a lot of money on the financial breakdown. Through this the people has lost money.

Now what has been the political reactions of the rulers to the economic crisis? The reaction has been more or less the same in most of the countries: Very big financial subsidies to the banks, to other financial institutions and to the capitalist companies. And everywhere these subsidies are paid mainly by the tax payers, by the workers and by weak groups such as the elderly, families with children, the youth, people in hospitals, etc., who have seen the public service dropping down.

In Denmark the main reaction from our bourgeois government and our Social Democracy has been 2 so-called 'bank-packages' that transferred thousands of millions to the banking sector, direct and indirect subsidies to the companies and tax reductions to the richer part of the population. On the other side the government has made severe cutbacks in the state finances and has dictated that the municipalities, who are responsible for most of the public service, should cut back the services, etc. The result has on one hand been that civil servants, teachers, employed in the social sector and in the health sector have been fired. And on the other hand the result has been a deterioration of the public service. The budgets for next year has just been decided in the municipals and is about to be decided in the parliament, and we have in many towns had big demonstrations against cut backs in schools, in the elder- and childcare. A special struggle and discussion in Denmark is our healthcare, our public hospitals. In Denmark hospitals have always been public. Private hospitals are a new thing for us. They exist now, and people are allowed to demand treatment in a private hospital, if they have to wait more than 1 month for treatment in a public hospital. The tax payers are paying for the excess price there, and this money is taken away from the public hospitals. In a time of crises, people protest, but on the other hand, everybody wants to be cured as fast as possible. This is for us communists an important ideological struggle between public and collective rights for all and the liberalist individualism: Pay for your individual rights. The collective rights in our country were not handed to the working class as a gift, we have fought for it through generations.

In our congress in May this year the party drew up a programme for having the capitalists pay for the crisis instead of the working class.

In our analysis we point out that the crisis is a crisis for the capitalist system as such, and that the economic crisis goes hand in hand with an energy crisis, a food crisis and an environmental crisis, and at the same time the imperialist foreign policy, including the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, is hidden by the crisis.

We therefore concluded that since the capitalist crisis is man-made and should be solved by the working people the only durable solution is to do away with capitalism as a system and replace it with socialism.

But until this we put forward a series of important demands of which I shall just mention a few:

-The banking sector should be nationalised.

-Much more investment in public service should be carried through including renovation of railways, schools, hospitals, non-profit dwellings to employ the unemployed.

-To relieve the situation for those directly affected by the crisis, including the unemployed, we demand that taxes on food and medicine should be lifted, that the unemployment benefit should be raised, that the prices for water, gas, heating and electricity should be frozen and other important steps. This kind of actions cannot solve the crisis but can make living easier for the working class and ordinary people.

We have discussed these matters with our comrades in the trade unions, and they have now started a campaign, where you sign for the demand of getting 25 % more in unemployment support. Many trade unions are supporting, and even national unions lead by the social democrats are now supporting and demand it to the government. Our argument is, of cause, that when so many as now are loosing their jobs, they are loosing at least 50 % of their income. Subsequently they can buy less, which means more problems for the capital selling its goods, which creates more unemployment and so on.

A problem for our struggle is the propaganda, brought out through the media. First of all they all stubbornly call the crises “ The financial crises”. And second, all media, including the television, daily reports from the so called stock-market about several indexes which people don’t understand at all. Now they are declaring that the crises is about to turn back, because this and this index has gone up some points. But they never connect it with the numbers of the increase in unemployment and the numbers of the increase in people who cannot pay for their houses or apartments because of unemployment. And that is where we see the economic crises, the crises of the capitalist system. The crises which will bring it to collapse again and there will again and again be no money to keep their speculations and maximum profits alive, when people are poor and unemployed.

The last aspect we would like to draw your attention to is the measures our government takes in the present situation. We are not only thinking of the so called anti-terrorist legislation, but new laws. As you all probably know, Denmark is hosting the international Climate summit (COP15) in December. At the moment our parliament is about to pass a special law. It is not yet fully decided on because of many protests, also from legal experts. But you can be sure it will be passed. The law will mean that the police can arrest people as for prevention purposes, if they suspect people of planning to take part in a demonstration where they might be so called violent. It also says that if you make a sit down demonstration, you are obstructing the work of the police, and will be immediately arrested, and a statutory sentence will be effectuated immediately and before you go to a court. The police and the government have already trained this new strategy against the people in order to see how it will work. Iraqi refugees who were denied asylum had asked for protection in a church in the middle of a working class area in Copenhagen against the authorities who wanted to send them back to Iraq. These people had lived in Denmark for many years, isolated in terrible camps. The solidarity was enormous In the middle of the night the police came, went into the church and took away the sleeping men in front of their mothers, wives and children. immediately a lot of people gathered outside the church and through a sit down demonstration tried to stop the police taking away the men. The police brutally hit the demonstrators. It was all filmed, and it became a very big event in the press – and still is. Most of the men are now back in Iraq, many of them are arrested, and many of them we haven’t heard from since. It was and is a big scandal, but nothing happened to the minister or to the police. And now the new law will make it legal. The Danish people has collected a lot of money to support the families who are still in Denmark, but now the court has confiscated all that money. The government is playing hard core, and it feels like a police state.

Never the less we are sure that there will be many and big demonstrations in connection with the summit in Copenhagen, and a lot of NGO activities. Surely the biggest event is a big manifestation Organized by the Danish – Cuban Friendship Association, our communist parties, trade unions, solidarity movements and other progressives. The 17th of December, at the end of the summit, we have organized a big public solidarity meeting with all the presidents from the 9 ALBA countries in Latin America. As far as we know at present, most of them will be there. There is room for 5.000 people in the hall, and we are selling tickets. But they are already very much in demand, so if any of you will be in Copenhagen during the summit and wish to attend the meeting, please tell us, and we shall book tickets for you.

So, comrades, we are struggling in Denmark as well as you all are. The capitalist system is a dying system, but its death takes time, and they will not give up voluntarily. That is why they create this special legislation and make such a big event out of the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, among other things.

We are all struggling in our countries and regions, but the struggle against capitalism and for socialism is an international struggle where international meetings as the present one can play an enormous role in inspiring us all and in the coordination of the national activities.